A group show of gallery artists’ works shown alongside a selection of 18th and 19th century objets d’art, drawing upon Volker Eichelmann’s interest in classical country house architecture and landscape from the renaissance and early modern period along with the mid 20th-century characters who inhabited them. Painting, collage, bronze and ceramic sculpture initiate a series of eccentric conversation across generations, styles and media. The contemporary is framed in the context of objets d’art and furniture that act as plinths, and which share stylistic tropes and eccentricities. For example, Faïence vases and covers by Ary Blankers, Amsterdam (c. 1760) and an Eighteenth Century ‘looking glass” from Bilbao.

This gathering of ‘Ancient & Modern’ will include Markus Karstieß’s platinum glazed vases and a large ceramic ‘corner’ paravent, new paintings by Jan Pleitner and Matthias Dornfeld that each recall a movement more modern than contemporary, from the 50s to the 20’s respectively; Des Hughes’ shows a new cabinet poised on cast branches of trees which reflects on the Surrealists use of such ‘frames’ to bring together different artworks of his own. Eichelmann implicates drawings and paintings by special guests Eileen Agar (1899-1991), Cecil Beaton (1904-80), Patrick Procktor (1936-2003), Denton Welch (1915-48) and Stephan Tennant (1906-87). Eichelmann himself shows paintings using quotes by poets Tennant and his associates Brian Howard and James Lees Milne. All contribute to the conjuring of a sense of place or atmosphere often whimsical and capricious in nature.

AN CIENT & MODERN presents “doowylloh”, the first exhibition in London by Dusseldorf-based painter Jan Pleitner, alongside drawings from the 1960’s by Lee Lozano (1930-99).

Lozano’s works on paper almost describe still-lives, whose spaces are hewn from a peculiar assemblage of aeroplanes, eyeballs, knives, black-holes and body parts. Her diverse output refuses easy categorisation and indeed she stopped making art from 1971, even extending indefinitely her “Boycott Piece” of that same year in an extraordinary gesture to avoid any conversation with women. In their gesture and palette Jan Pleitner’s paintings recall an earlier 20th century abstraction. His practice has a similar symbolic singularity to it – often the paintings are made during the course of one night and as such the record of a private performance of sorts – and aim to be no less constrained and to embed themselves in the imagination.

Pleitner (b.1984) is a graduate of the Dusseldorf Akademie, where he studied under Tal R and Jorg Immendorf. He had his first museum show at Stadtmuseum Oldenburg, Germany last year.